Harris to present program on gardening at Kane library – Bradford Era

KANE — The Kane Garden Club will present a gardening program featuring Master Gardener Bob Harris at the Friends’ Memorial Public Library in Kane starting at 9:15 a.m. Saturday.

Harris will address “Answers to Questions You Never Asked in the Garden,” beginning in the Forman Room on the lower level of the library. Harris encourages those attending to bring their own gardening questions for discussion.

Harris is a certified master gardener through Penn State Cooperative Extension, the primary gardener at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford as a member of the maintenance crew and the host of “Around the Home,” a weekly call-in gardening show on WESB-AM radio in Bradford.

Harris’s interest in plants began at an early age. He had his own garden plot at home and helped an uncle plant trees around the periphery of a 300 acre farm before he was 10. While living in Gowanda, N.Y., at the age of 13, he surprised his mother with a gift of 100 tulips he picked on the way home from school. Unfortunately, the plants came from a large nearby estate, and Harris found himself working off the present with his labor.

“It was meant as a punishment to work off the cost of the flowers, but I learned a lot working next to the gardener,” Harris recalled. “I learned mostly by observation because the man was Dutch and barely spoke a word of English.”

Harris soon found his talents in demand and was offered landscaping jobs by local businesses and property owners. He is largely self-taught, and has amassed a library of more than 300 volumes on all facets of gardening.

“I did take classes for the Master Gardener program through Penn State,” Harris said, “and I’ve attended seminars whenever possible, probably over 2,000 hours worth over about three decades.”

The program is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.